In Reformed Theology and Evolutionary Theology, Gijsbert van den Brink provides readers with an insightful tour of the most important theological implications and controversies related to evolutionary theory while also providing the first book length treatment of these issues from a distinctively Reformed perspective since the nineteenth century. In the first three chapters of the…

Gijsbert van den Brink is to be congratulated on a well-written, lucid volume on this important and controversial topic. His attention to the range of different views in Chapter three is notable and generous. In each generation systematic theology has to articulate Christian belief in relation to the major issues of the day and the…

What to do with Adam and Eve? The consensus view within the scientific community is that modern humans, Homo sapiens, evolved from primates and that this process took approximately two million years. During this time there arose several transitional species of hominids along with parallel species that were close relatives. With some of these relatives,…

As an evangelical Christian, the approach I use to construct origins models relies on two data sets: (1) Scripture, and (2) the record of nature. Ideally, the resulting models should comfortably accommodate both sets of data. Of course, drawing insights from Scripture and the record of nature requires an interpretive process. The approach we adopt…

A major challenge in origins-related discussions is that there are usually a variety of interrelated “forces” at work “underneath” any position one specifies. In the face of debate it is often a difficult task to narrate one’s rationale because the interactions of these convictions may not be linear or even clearly definable. Our underlying judgments…

Christians are those who strive to believe and obey the voice of God, revealed and preserved in holy writ. It is a classic position with implications for faith in the modern world, not least the tensions that some experience between biblically informed convictions and many of the claims of natural science. Even if scholars might…

In response to my first essay, Hans asked whether there is a special category of God’s way of interacting with the world known as ‘special providence?’ It is hard to know exactly what this means. The biblical literature clearly knows of ‘miracles,’ without which there would be no Christian faith. Three words in particular are used…

What Did I Mean? The word “creationism” means different things to different people, so it is necessary to define it right off the bat in discussions like these, so as not to result in more confusion than progress. In my essay I wrote that I understood “creationism” as: “the idea that some parts of nature…

Thanks to Hans for this important and stimulating conversation, and for the follow-up questions. I’ll attempt to get to each of them, albeit with a kind of exceeding terseness that will probably only raise more questions! Definitions and Deism It should be obvious that Behe and I are using different definitions of evolutionary creation. As…

Theistic evolution is a theological interpretation of evolutionary biology as it is understood through evolutionary molecular biology, natural selection, and population genetics (the Modern Synthesis), as well as epigenetic inheritance, evolutionary-developmental biology (evo-devo), and convergent evolution, to name a few of the most important scientific contributions to the general field of evolutionary biology. The central…

On the day of Pentecost, in one of the most dramatic sermons ever preached, Peter proclaimed that “You killed the author of life” [Acts 3:15]. Authorship is a powerful metaphor for referring to the Christological creation, that wonderful created order in which we find our existence. The New Testament insists that it is through Christ…

It is generally agreed that the most recent and perhaps greatest challenge posed by science to Christianity came with the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Although evolution as a concept had become current and popular in the eighteenth century due to the work of pioneering French biologist Jean Baptiste…